he virulence of the 1998 turbulence in the mature financial markets took market participants and authorities by surprise , and some have acknowledged that they do not fully understand the rapidly changing structure and dynamics of global financial markets. 1 As last year's International Capital Markets report analyzed, a substantial buildup in derivatives credit exposures and leverage contribut...

For many, derivatives are often associated with infamous financial events and scandals resulting from highly leveraged and speculative use of derivative financial instruments. The most common use of these instruments is, however, in the often quiet area of risk management rather than the charged atmosphere of high stakes betting. At the most basic level, a derivative is simply a financial instr...

Most existing digital wallet implementations support a single or a limited set of proprietary financial instruments and protocols for electronic commerce transactions, preventing a user from having one consolidated digital wallet to manage all of his or her financial instruments. Commercial efforts to implement extensible digital wallets that are capable of inter-operating with multiple instrum...

This paper proposes a theory of financial intermediation as a form of cognition. It shows that each of the important elements of financial intermediation performs a cognitive role. This includes foundational instruments such as money and institutions such as banks. By demonstrating the cognitive work it performs, this theory also offers a new explanation for emergent financial phenomena, such a...

One of the most widely used (and most successful) methods for pricing financial and insurance instruments under risk is the Wang transform method. In this paper, we provide a new explanation for the empirical success of Wang’s method – by providing a new simpler justification for the Wang transform. Pricing under risk: a problem. The price of most financial instruments unpredictably (randomly) ...

It has been argued that pension funds should have limitations on their asset allocation, based on the risk profile of the different financial instruments available on the financial markets. This issue proves to be highly relevant at times of market crisis, when a regulation establishing limits to risk taking for pension funds could prevent defaults. In this paper we present a framework for eval...